Byron did: in praise of poetry by Leanne Dyck

Byron did. So did Shelley and Yeats and Burns and Cohen and Atwood and Browning and...

'Let me count the ways' wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning

But my ways refuse to be counted. My brain can't think like that. My pen won't write like that.

Lord Byron wrote:  'She walks in beauty, like the night' -- and women swooned.

Poetry is like French. It sounds pretty coming out of someone else's mouth. It pours out of someone else's pen. But not mine.

Metaphors as yummy as pettifor and language that would be swarmed by bees make poetry challenging to understand. Most of it sails passed my ears and over my head.

 A Coat by W. B. Yeats

I made my song a coat

covered with embroideries

Out of old mythologies

From heel to throat

But the fools caught it

Wore it in the world's eyes

As though they'd wrought it

Song, let them take it

For there's more

enterprise

In walking naked

We have poetry in our souls, they say. But I've checked. Mine has gone. If it was ever there.

Margaret Atwood wrote:  'We turned out the lights in the cellar and played Murder in the Dark.' Then she wrote, 'I heard that this game was once played at a summer cottage by six normal people and a poet, and the poet really tried to kill someone.'

I used to claim that my amazing dyslexic brain was to blame.

"People with dyslexia can't work with syllables," I'd say.

But then I read that Yeats had dyslexia.

Robert Burns wrote:  'My love is like a red, red rose.'

Maybe poetry is like a garden. Maybe it has to be seeded and carefully tended. Rhythm, rhyme, meter -- maybe if I studied... Maybe... But who has that kind of time?

It might be trite,

but it's also right --

I'm not a poet

And I know it.

Guest Post Leaf Press, Ursula Vaira (founder and publisher)

Ursula Vaira founded Leaf Press in 2001 as a poetry chapbook publisher. Since 2007 she has been publishing trade poetry while continuing the chapbook tradition and the weekly on-line Monday’s Poem.

"Poetry, paddling and west-coast wilderness camping are my passions, and they show in my writing (And See What Happens, Caitlin Press) and in the works I choose for Leaf's list. This year I am so proud to have published Poems for Planet Earth, a round-up of poems from readers at internationally renowned Planet Earth Poetry in Victoria BC; Surge Narrows by Emilia Nielsen, in which 'words rush like cold, clean water over the skin' (Anne Simpson); milk tooth bane bone by Daniela Elza, 'an open armature for wonder' (David Abram); and Dark Matter by Leanne McIntosh, an invitation to 'listen, listen as though the moon/has just pressed her face/against ours.'

Publishing is not for the easily frightened. The hours are long.  The money is spare. The printing bills come due. Invoice payments arrive late. Contracts are signed long before the granting agencies approve or reject funding applications. No one lasts long in the biz without a passion for the work.

But the rewards! Money aside. Glory aside. But being able to work so intimately with these amazing poets, to spend hours and hours inside their words during the editing and design and typesetting until I know nearly every word by heart--and then to sit in an audience during the book launch, watching the effect of the poet's words play on each face ... I don't know, it just does it for me.

 Ursula Vaira, Publisher

Leaf Press – Publishing Poetry Only

www.leafpress.ca

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